Rare Books

A sale has just taken place of a rare Jane Austen first edition of "Emma". £180 000 was paid for it.
No one will read it. It is just collected, and looked at I suppose - "look at what I've got!".
Reminds me of a friend of mine who was offered a few bottles of a very superior wine for a knock-down sale; he turned down the offer only to find that a few years later the price of the bottles had rocketed.
No one drank it of course. Not even worth looking at really.
These things are "collectors' items", of no use, with no apparent aesthetic value, only money value.
But, when you come to think of it, this is how picture sales operate: when a Monet is sold for millions, this doesn't reflect the artistic value of the work but its money value as a "collector's item".
My wife is going to buy a Beryl Cooke painting (reproduction, that is - even her paintings have gone up recently, probably because she died a couple of weeks ago) because she likes it, which I think is a pretty laudable reason. The fact that I can't stand the paintings means nothing much (except that I'll have to look at it now and then).
But there! - I don't like Monet's very much either.